Comic Sans Everywhere!

I was kinda curious about how difficult it is to write a Google Chrome app or extension, especially with all the hype over Chrome OS recently. I wrote a Firefox extension a couple months ago (here) and I also wanted to know how developing extensions for the two platforms compared.

The Firefox extension involved using XUL (XML User-interface Language), Mozilla’s layout language, an XML manifest, and lots of XML and Javascript in random places. The layout language was awkward and confusing, as was the directory structure for the extension. To be fair, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to learn it, so perhaps it would have gotten easier over time.

In contrast, writing a Chrome extension was really easy. The only mandatory file is a JSON manifest and the rest is just javascript and HTML5. The directory structure is entirely up to the developer to organize and all the browser specific APIs are available via Javascript and are documented pretty clearly here.

Anyway, my first extension changes all the text on every webpage to Comic Sans MS. It’s not all that useful, but it was fun to play with. Click here to test it out. The code (linked here), as always, is on Github.